In an attempt to convince The Open Group that they finally want to fully Open Source Motif and CDE Peter Howkins has started a petition to help gauge how much interest there is. CDE, the Common Desktop Enviroment, was the default desktop on several commercial UNIX distributions. Motif is a X Windows widget
API used in many programs, including CDE
and other projects such as nedit and DDD. Howkins is not going to try to convince anyone to use either of them, but if you use them and would like to see them Open Sourced please sign the petition. For more background information about CDE and this petition visit the petition site or go straight to signing the petition.

I'd like to see CDE released under a license that allows commercial use (BSD license?). Developers that cannot afford to spend tons of money for licenses could do their work with a professional desktop environment.

The DE and the Motif toolkit are "good enough" for users of commercial applications, and the customers do not need to buy all-new boxes. A port of CDE that runs on top of a BSD or Linux would be great. It's usefull as an environment where the user does not do "too much" (e. g. clicks around everywhere he can), but uses his main application, maybe a mail client and a browser. The Motif toolkit provides useful means to implement GUI driven applications. You have everything look consistent and well-formed.

BTW: The XFCE3 port is quite cool, it can be tweaked to look like the "real" CDE.